Kaspersky researcher cracks Flame malware password

Researchers have cracked the password protecting a server that controlled the Flame espionage botnet giving them access to the malware control panel to learn more about how the network functioned and who might be behind it.

Kaspersky analyst Dmitry Bestuzhev cracked the hash for the password Sept. 17 just hours after Symantec put out a public request for help getting into the control panel for Flame, which infected thousands of computers in the Mideast.

The hash - 27934e96d90d06818674b98bec7230fa - was resolved to the plain text password 900gage!@# by Bestuzhev.

Symantec said it tried to break the hash with brute force attacks but failed. Flame has been investigated by a joint effort of Symantec, ITU-IMPACT and CERT-Bund/BSI.

Meanwhile, researchers at Symantec report that Flame was being developed at least as long ago as 2006, four years before its Flamer's compilation date of 2010 and well before the initial deployment of the first Flame command and control server March 18 of this year.

By May, Flame had been discovered and owners of infected computers in Iran and other Mideast countries were cleaning up. The malware itself also executed a suicide command in May to purge itself from infected computers.

The command and control server also routinely wiped out its log files, which successfully obliterated evidence of who might be behind the attacks. "Considering that logging was disabled and data was wiped clean in such a thorough manner, the remaining clues make it virtually impossible to determine the entity behind the campaign," the Symantec report says.

Despite Flame being neutralized earlier this year, more undiscovered variants may exist, the report concludes. Evidence for this is that the command and control module can employ four protocols to communicate with compromised clients, three of which are in use. "The existence of three supported protocols, along with one protocol under development, confirms the C&C server's requirement to communicate with multiple evolutions (variants) of W32.Flamer or additional cyberespionage malware families currently unknown to the public."

A sophisticated support team ran the spy network that gathered data from infected computers and uploaded it to command servers, the Symantec report says. The team had three distinct roles - server admins, operators who sent and received data from infected client machines and coordinators who planned attacks and gathered stolen data.

"This separation of operational and attacker visibility and roles indicates that this is the work of a highly organized and sophisticated group," the report authors conclude.

The servers gathered the data encrypted then passed it along to be decrypted offline. Each infected machine had its own encryption key.

Evidence from one of its command and control servers indicates the server can talk to at least four other pieces of malicious code that researchers believe are either undiscovered Flame variants or completely separate attacks, according to a Symantec report.

This is accomplished with a versatile Web application called Newsforyou supported by a MySQL database that could be used as a component for other attacks.

Researchers also discovered a set of commands the server could execute including one that wipes log files in an effort to minimize forensic evidence should the server be compromised. It also cleaned out files of stolen data in order to keep disk space free.

"The Newsforyou application is written in PHP and contains the primary command-and-control functionality split into two parts," the report says, "the main module and the control panel." The main module includes sending encryption packages to infected clients, uploading data from infected clients, and archiving when unloading files.

The application resembles a news or blog application, perhaps in an effort to avoid detection by automated or causal inspection, the researchers say.

PHP source code for Newsforyou included notes that identified four authors - D***, H*****, O****** and R*** - who had varying degrees of involvement. D*** and H***** edited the most files and so had the most input. "O****** and R*** were tasked with database and cleanup operations and could easily have had little or no understanding of the inner workings of the application," the report says. ". It is likely D*** and O****** knew each other, as they both worked on the same files and during a similar time period in December 2006."

Newsforyou employed both public key and symmetric key encryption depending on the type of data being encrypted. News files intended for clients were encrypted with symmetric keys while stolen data was encrypted using public/private key pairs.

Despite Flame being exposed in May, the evidence left behind in compromised command and control servers indicates the overall spying project it was part of is still alive. "There is little doubt that the larger project involving cyber-espionage tools, such as Flamer, will continue to evolve and retrieve information from the designated targets," the report says.

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